The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück's Story of Resistance

Yahoo

2 days ago

A circa 1941 photo of Germaine Tillion, French ethnologist and member of the French resistance. Credit - adoc-photos/Corbis--Getty Images
A new book aims to preserve the stories of the prisoners at an all-female Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust, who resisted their captors as much as possible.
Lynne Olson's The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler's All-Female Concentration Camp looks at a labor camp about 50 miles north of Berlin where an estimated 130,000 female inmates were members of resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe. They sabotaged any assignments to help with the war effort, hid Polish prisoners who were the subjects of medical experiments, and even wrote and shared an opera to keep their spirits up.
For her book, Olson drew on memoirs that the prisoners wrote, past interviews that they conducted, and conversations with their families and the people that knew them. She details horrific conditions in the camp, such as the Nazi officers who hurled scissors at inmates forced to sew Nazi uniforms and the Nazi's so-called doctors who cut open Polish inmates and inserted gangrene bacteria, dirt, and glass into their wounds to see what would happen. As many as 40,000 Ravensbrück inmates died of starvation, disease, torture, shooting, lethal injections, medical experiments, and from lethal gas.
Here, Olson discusses the most shocking stories about the all-female Nazi concentration camp.
TIME: Why isn't the history of Ravensbrück better known?
OLSON: It was liberated by the Soviets, rather than the Americans. When the Soviets liberated camps, there were no Western journalists, so there are no photos, no footage of the liberation of the camp.
Ravensbrück was also liberated very late in the game. Most of the other camps had been liberated. There had been so much publicity about the other camps, and then nobody knew anything at all about Ravensbrück.
A shocking revelation in the book details how one of the prisoners at Ravensbrück was Geneviève, the niece of Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French resistance movement and future President of France.
Before she got caught by the Gestapo, she was a major figure in persuading resistance leaders that De Gaulle would help lead France out of this horrendous situation that they found themselves in.
Geneviève would go around to the various barracks—something that was totally forbidden—and speak to the other French women about him and his plans for France after the war. He gave those women something to believe in and to fight for, to believe that maybe actually they would survive and that France would survive. She was incredibly important in keeping up the spirits of the French women there.
What are some of the most surprising stories you learned about what happened in the camp?
One of the most horrible ones is the medical experiments that the Nazis conducted on the young Polish prisoners, most of whom were in their late teens and early 20s. He would break their legs and see if they grow back. He inserted bacilli, tetanus and germs [into them], cut their legs to ribbons. Most of them were crippled for the rest of their lives.
The records show that basically all of them survived. As the war grew to a close, the Nazis were going to execute all of the survivors of these experiments to do away with the evidence of what they had done. In the last month of the war, Ravensbrück got tens of thousands of women who had been in other camps, and it was not clear exactly who was who, so it was much easier to get away with things. Women dug little caves under the barracks and hid the Poles there. Some [inmates] managed to smuggle the Poles into convoys that were going out.
It's fascinating to see that one of the inmates composed an operetta about life in the camp, as her form of resistance. I assume that did not get performed in the camp?
That's my favorite story in the entire book. It was written down, and it was circulated among French women.
Germaine Tillion came up with it late one night in 1944. At the time that she wrote it, the women of Ravensbrück were beginning to think that they were not going to get liberated, that they were going to get killed before the end of the war. Tillion spent 10 days writing this operetta to boost their spirit—complete with dances, music, and songs that she remembered.
Every night after work, she would gather secretly with the French women in her barracks, and she would teach them the songs and the dance. They would sing these songs on their way to work, guarded by German guards. The Germans didn't understand French, and these women would basically be making fun of them as they walked along.
More than 60 years later, it was performed in Paris, very close to Germane Tillion's 100th birthday. It was a huge success, and it's being performed to this day, mostly in France, but it's been performed in the US and other countries.
Were there any other key ways that these women resisted or stood up to the Nazis in the camp?
One of the most important ways was to try not to do anything that would help the Germans in their war effort. They would actually hide to avoid being sent to munitions factories. Those who couldn't get out of it did their best to sabotage whatever they were doing. If they were making parts for guns, they would do their best to make sure that those guns didn't work. They stole supplies. They were constantly trying to come up with ways to defy the Germans.
What happened to these women after Ravensbrück was liberated?
Germaine Tillion became known as one of the top French intellectuals in France after the war, and Geneviève de Gaulle set up an international organization to help the poor and the homeless. When she saw the poor and the homeless in France after the war, they reminded her of herself and the other inmates in Ravensbrück.
Basically, the French overall wanted to forget the war. They wanted to forget the fact that, as a country, France had capitulated to the Germans and then collaborated with the Germans. They didn't really want to face what their country had done. They were determined to make it very clear to the country—and also to the men who were taking credit for the resistance—that women had sought to keep their country free.
What did you find in your research that strikes you as particularly timely in 2025?
In this evil place that was designed to dehumanize you, these women created this sisterhood and refused to allow that to happen. [The resistance in] Ravensbrück shows the incredible power of individuals when they come together to overcome evil in the worst of situations. Authoritarianism is back, and this book is a lesson: You're not powerless. You're not powerless if you join in the community and work together to do something.
Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [e-mail].